A Very She & Him Christmas

After two albums of cheerily frivolous indie pop, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward return with an album of Christmas tunes.

Look away, all those who would claim to loathe Zooey Deschanel, for her cultural saturation point is nigh. Even now the fates have begun chiseling her porcelain visage onto the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Mount Rushmore (preferably capturing the bewildered look she gave Billy Crudup at the end of Almost Famous), honoring her decade-long career as Twee Personified. Starlet of successful indie flicks and failed blockbusters (Hitchhiker's Guide is underrated), elegant shiller of cotton, remarkably infuriating Top Chef cameo veteran, and faithful companion to what passes in 2011 for a rock star, she now brings us The New Girl, a ludicrous Fox sitcom that is, at the very least, less wantonly shat upon than Whitney. (Still, though, if you ever have the opportunity to train a pit bull to rip someone's throat out merely by your uttering a "code word," do make that code word "adorkable.") Ah yes, and there's She & Him, her Instagram-folk outfit with the quietly excellent M. Ward, proud parents of two cheerily frivolous full-length records many people took remarkably seriously, and why not. And now, a Christmas album. Various deluxe editions come packaged with a hat and/or mittens.

If any or all of this enrages you (including her perfectly competent, bizarrely derided delivery of the National Anthem at a World Series game the other day), you oughta find other stuff to get enraged about. (Seriously, no worse than B- for vocal, and, okay, D+ for the dress.) Even if you don't buy into her It Girl/sex-symbol campaign, let us admit that Zooey's dainty, bright, appealingly low-swooping voice is Good for an Actress, and that's only, like, 15% pejorative. But A Very She & Him Christmas actually isn't hateable enough. Whether you come to praise or bury it, you're looking for something ultra-campy, overloaded with rampant corniness and gratuitous special guests, the holiday equivalent of Jenny Lewis' cover of "Handle With Care". Nah though. No Ben Gibbard, no Will Ferrell, no Mark Wahlberg, nobody. Lots of guitar-and-vocal skeletal sparseness, reaching for transcendent Charlie Brown melancholia but arriving instead at something merely dour. She sings, "They know that Santa's on his way," as though "Santa" were actually a plague of locusts. She should've recorded this while drunk.

Oh, now, though, these songs are fine, fine. "I'll Be Home for Christmas" has a nearly erotic rockabilly sashay, and M. Ward solos with economical dexterity throughout, and improves the record exponentially when his grumbly vocals first kick in on the shuffling "Christmas Wish"; their voices are lovely when intertwined, and at least offer a whiff of transcendent melancholia. Your crucial jam here is ordinarily immensely problematic yuletide sexual-predator anthem "Baby, It's Cold Outside", America's first taste of her vocal talents via Elf, the gender roles now swapped so Zooey bars the door and M. wonders what's in this drink; she blows through her lines in a zippy Eleanor Friedberger jumble, finally loosening up.

Most of the rest is just retightened Don't Fuck It Up competence, alas-- nothing you could call sacrilege, especially given that any Christmas-themed song that does not explicitly praise the birth of Jesus is technically sacrilege. Her "Blue Christmas" is alright but can't touch Porky Pig's; her "Little Saint Nick" is alright but can't touch John Denver and the Muppets'. They add an extra beat to "Sleigh Bells" so as to feel all musical. They attempt to redeem the irredeemable "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" and nearly succeed; they attempt to add gratuitous gravitas to a solo-Zooey "Silver Bells" and fail. (Step away from the ukulele, first of all, and it's hard to sell the line, "And above all this bustle you hear," when there ain't no bustle.) "The Christmas Song" closes us out similarly too prim and grim, but it'll nonetheless ably soundtrack quite a few Xmas-morning marriage proposals amongst happy couples who also knitted each other sweaters to complement their reindeer-besieged wool pajama pants. (Cotton, make that cotton.)

It'd be nice to make even more cheap children's librarian jokes, but they played this one too safe. For a record whose immediate cultural precedent is Pomplamoose's Hyundai ads, this should have been way more polarizing. Savage the Kinks' "Father Christmas", excavate Paul McCartney's mega-twee "Wonderful Christmastime", give Vince Guaraldi's grave a few spins, something. No, for schadenfreude proceed directly to Scott Weiland's A Methadone Christmas or whatever it's called; A Very She & Him stands guilty not of being oppressively adorkable, but of being not nearly adorkable enough.